


Parachutes

by onlymton



Series: Finding Runner Five [1]
Category: Zombies Run!
Genre: A Bit of Fluff, Angst, F/M, Female Runner Five, Gen, Shameless tropes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-27
Updated: 2016-09-26
Packaged: 2018-08-17 11:22:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8141960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onlymton/pseuds/onlymton
Summary: Snapshots of Sam's interactions with Runner Five, from S1M1 through S3M48.The first time Sam sees her, he doesn’t remember much about her afterward. Over time, though, he comes to see this new Runner Five as an ally, a friend...and, maybe, something more.***Season 1, 2, and 3 spoilers through S3M48***Unbeta'ed.





	1. Chapter 1

The first time Sam sees her, he doesn’t remember much about her afterward. How could he, moments after watching them shoot Alice? 

Rather, the zombie that had been Alice.

He remembers only that he’s a little surprised to see it was a young woman – somehow, he had assumed it would be a man. No particular reason why, he supposed. Maybe something to do with all those parachute action figures he played with as a kid.

But when they open the gates, well, it’s not just a woman, but a quiet woman. Very quiet. No “hey, I’m so-and-so, thanks for saving my life out there while they shot the zombie who used to be your girlfriend.” She just stands there in camo fatigues, arms crossed around the large CDC file, not saying a word.

This woman turns out to be nothing like Alice, except that she looks to be around his age. Alice seemed to float when she walked, her limbs graceful, her movements delicate. There is nothing graceful about this new Runner Five. Her steps are short, heavy, precise. She doesn’t seem to realize that she should be a little nervous in a place full of strangers; she stands, hand on one hip, sweeping her surroundings with piercing eyes. She fully inhabits the space she is in, and at first people give her a lot of room. It’s not until she starts proving herself on missions – which doesn’t take long – that everyone wants to be her friend.

Or more than friends.


	2. Chapter 2

“Hey, Runner Five, join us!” shouts Simon from the runner’s table.

The runners usually sit together in the mess tent, along with Sam, Maxine (when she’s able), and Janine (on the rare occasions when she deigns to join them). Sam is flattered to be included in the group; he cares about his runners a lot, and he’s glad they feel the same.

The new Runner Five is limping a little as she approaches with her plate. It was a tough mission today, Sam reflects, but he got her and Jody through it. Well, truth be told, Five’s stubbornness and incredible stamina got them through it. He just helped a little along the way.

He can’t believe any of the spy talk that he’s been hearing about her. He considers himself pretty good at reading people, and there’s just no guile in her face. It shows what’s she’s feeling, even if she stays silent most of the time.

She sits down next to Simon, waving back at Jody when she says “hi.”

“So, Five, sounds like you gave your ankle quite a turn,” says Simon, throwing an arm around her shoulders.

Five’s shoulders hunch in, just a bit, but she doesn’t completely shrug Simon’s arm off. 

“The zom did the turning,” says Five. 

Simon moves his hand from her shoulder to the middle of her back and starts massaging. She turns narrowed eyes on him, and his arm slips off.

“You should’ve seen Five,” says Jody, taking a bite of tinned ham. “She took its head off while it had hold of her ankle. Never seen anything like it.”

“She’s a feisty one, that’s for sure,” says Simon, leaning into Five a little.

Five shovels her own forkful of ham into her mouth and follows it with a large gulp of water. 

Sam finds himself rooting for her to succeed in brushing Simon off, which he has to admit is a bit odd. Simon’s had his fair share of conquests in the township, if the rumours are to be believed. Why should Sam care if the new Runner Five succumbs to his charms?

“She did real well today,” says Sara as she exchanges a nod with Five.

“Yeah,” adds Sam. “When you chopped off that one zom’s arm while kicking the other one to the ground – that was really something.”

Five shrugs, but he catches the hint of a smile in her eyes.

“I always did go for the strong, silent type,” says Simon, fixing his gaze on Five.

“You go for any type that will take you,” says Sara.

Jody blushes and looks very interested in her plate.

Ah, thinks Sam, the gossip about her and Simon is true. Jody still won’t look up, and he guesses that she is upset about his attention to Five. He knows his runners well, maybe better than they realize.

Well, except for the new Runner Five. He catches himself – got to stop thinking of her as “the new Runner Five.” She’s just plain “Runner Five” now. He feels a rock of guilt and longing lodge in his stomach, and he’s no longer hungry. Alice wouldn’t let Simon flirt with her; she’d snuggle up to Sam and put her head lightly on his shoulder, tickle his back, giggle at one of his lame jokes. For some reason, he tries to imagine the new Runner Five doing the same and fails. She’s definitely not the tickling, giggling type. She’s serious, intense. 

Smouldering.

“That’s out of line,” says Sara in a low, dangerous voice. Sam shakes his head, realizes he missed something while he was daydreaming. Sara is half-standing, fork in hand like a weapon, aiming it at Simon. 

“Ease off, Sara,” says Simon.

“It’s okay,” says Jody. “I’m done anyway.” She stands, taking her plate with half of her meal still on it.

“If you’re not going to eat that…” begins Simon.

Jody drops the plate in front of him and leaves.

Five takes the fork out of Sara’s hand, and Sara sits back down.

“You’re right, Five, not worth my time,” she says. “Not today, anyway.”

Five has managed to befriend Sara, thinks Sam. How about that.

Simon’s persistent – Sam knows that he can’t resist a challenge – and when Five stands with her empty plate, he’s at her elbow.

“Allow me, Runner Five,” he says, taking her plate.

Five rolls her eyes at him behind his back, and Sam stifles a chuckle.

Simon returns and slips an arm around Five’s waist. “Can I show you that gun we were talking about earlier?”

“I’ll turn in, then,” says Five, sliding out from under his arm and exiting the tent. 

Simon watches her leave before turning to the table. “Good night, Sam, Sara,” he says before following Five.

“He doesn’t take no for an answer, does he?” says Sam.

“He usually doesn’t have to,” says Sara. “But I think our new Runner Five’s more than a match for him.”

“She’s not our ‘new Runner Five’ anymore,” says Sam, his loyalty for Five landing next to his grief for Alice. “She’s just our Five.”


	3. Chapter 3

“Can you manage that box, Five? You’ve still got a few kilometers to go,” says Sam.

She grunts.

“I’ll take that as a yes, then,” he says.

Routine supply run, and thankfully nothing much has gone wrong. A couple of shamblers along the way, nothing that Five couldn’t handle. He doesn’t like sending runners out alone on long missions, but they’re spread pretty thin these days, what with rebuilding Abel after the attack by Van Ark and all.

Five raided a tool shop with good pickings and stopped by one of the settlements on the way back to trade two of Janine’s tomato plants for a box of shingles. While there, a group of older ladies pressed Five to take a rather sizable cardboard box.

“Don’t open it ‘til you get back to Abel,” Sam had heard them tell her through her headcam mic. “It’s a thank you for what you young lady runners have done for us.”

Sam hopes the box isn’t heavy; he imagines that the tools and nails and shingles in her rucksack likely are. Not that Five would complain. She never complains.

He finds himself talking to her a lot on these solo runs. She never says much back, but the spaces she leaves empty invite him to speculate about what’s next on the menu, analyze the last Demons and Darkness session, share the latest township gossip.

“So the sheep farmer wouldn’t take any of Ed’s trades,” he says, “and, wouldn’t you know it, the next day, he wakes up with a pen full of sheared sheep and little Molly walking around with a fleece cape. Ed says he’d be damned if he’d let his little girl be cold this winter, and after the sheep farmer found the bottle of tequila Ed left for him…”

Five comes into view on one of the long-range camera feeds.

“Oh, good, I can see you now. Just a bit more to go. So, the sheep farmer is currently sleeping it off in hospital after getting totally pissed and threatening to shear Ed and ‘see how he’d like it.’”

Five releases a short huff of laughter, and the whole ridiculous story is worth it. She doesn’t laugh easily. Everyone has a lot to be despondent about, but Five seems to carry more than most.

Lately, he’s having a hard time not watching her, not noticing these small things.

She approaches the gates, and he gives the command to raise them. From the camera just inside, he sees her deliver the box to a waiting Janine. Curiosity gets the better of him, and he shuts off the equipment and wanders over to see what was sent back for the runners.

He walks along the main thoroughfare of the township. A lot of the rubble has been sorted, broken down into scrap and firewood, but a few piles still remain in between the massive rows of tents. 

He catches up with Five and Janine in the still-standing armoury, where a table sits just inside the doors for cataloguing supplies. Five empties the contents of her rucksack into neat little groupings – tools, packages of nails and screws, the shingles. Janine takes a penknife out of her pocket and slices the top of the box open.

“Oh,” says Janine, peering inside for a moment before closing the flaps back together, her cheeks bright red. “Er, what did they say about this?”

“It’s a thank you, for the runners,” says Sam, now even more interested in what’s inside. He can’t remember the last time he saw Janine blush. “Remember when Maxine patched up that old couple there?”

“For the ‘young lady runners,’” says Five, leaning over. Janine steps back a bit, allows Five to lift a cardboard flap, and Five’s eyes get a bit wide as she, too, takes a look.

“Well, we can put these to use, I suppose,” says Janine, all business-like again. She extricates a jumble of satin and lace from the box. It’s knickers and bras, tags still attached, and nice ones, too, from the smooth, rich look of the material. Five reaches in and pulls out a small heap of fabric to sort. Sam feels his own cheeks warm.

“Didn’t that old couple own a lingerie store?” asks Janine, unraveling a black lacy pair of underpants that seems more strings and lace than pants.

“Uh, afraid I don’t remember that,” says Sam, watching Five gingerly weave her hands between two tangled bras, one a bright pink, the other a softer blue that reminds him of a spring sky. She frees the garish pink one first, lays it flat, and then picks up the blue one to straighten its band, peeks of white ribbon revealing themselves along the way. The blue sets off her skin, and his imagination conjures up her wearing it before he can stop himself.

It’s been over a year since Alice died, and in that time, he hasn’t been with anyone else, hasn’t even imagined himself with anyone else. His grief for Alice, however, has evidently faded enough to make room for other feelings. Five is attractive, of course; it seems half of Abel has pursued her without success. But she’s not just a pretty face with a fit runner’s body to Sam. He knows that Five is there when Jody has nightmares. She carries Molly on her shoulders playing “horse.” She helps Chris catalogue his field notes and sorts supplies for Maxine when she’s supposed to be on a rest day. She even befriended Archie and those ridiculous chickens.

Yes, she’s strong and tough and stubborn. But she’s also loyal. Kind. Patient. And, yeah, she’s lovely, beautiful, even, with bright eyes and an even brighter smile. He’s been falling for her since the moment that she fell out of the sky.

He might as well admit to himself that he’s joined the club of Five’s admirers.


	4. Chapter 4

From inside the comms shack, Sam watches Five stumble inside the gates and slump onto the ground. Maxine is there, abandoning the bite check protocol to wrap her in a tight hug. He watches them cling to each other on the monitor.

He’s beyond relieved that she made it back, but he can’t stop thinking about who didn’t return with her.  
Paula is still with Van Ark.  
Sara can’t be dead.  
And Simon…he can’t bear to think about Simon.

The door to the shack swings open, and he wipes his eyes with the sleeve of his jumper before turning around to greet his guest. No one is there, just the door swinging in the breeze, though he swears he can hear Sara laughing.

“I’ll go mental if I stay in here,” he says to himself, not bothering to shut off the equipment before leaving the shack. He walks, not seeing anything, not paying attention to where he is going.

He finds himself at the hospital, the new building smelling of sawdust and paint. He wanders into the main treatment bay and sees Five hunched over on a cot.

Her wrists and knees are bloodied, her face dirty and bruised. He’s never seen her eyes so blank, so haunted. A horrible plunging sensation overwhelms him. He knows some of what Van Ark did to her, saw her dragged behind that truck before she disappeared from the comms, but what came after was clearly much worse.

“Do you know what Van Ark injected you with?” asks Maxine, examining the bruises in the crook of Five’s arm.

A small shake of her head.

“Does anything else hurt?”

She lifts her ripped, bloodstained shirt enough to expose her abdomen, revealing narrow streaks of crimson crisscrosses and puncture wounds mixed with round purplish bruises.

Sam’s gut clenches, and he chokes back the bile rising in his throat.

“What did he do this with?” asks Maxine, her voice shaking.

“Wires. Needles. Hammer.” Five doesn’t look up.

Before the apocalypse, Sam hadn’t thought he could really hate anyone. Sure, people could annoy you sometimes, but he had always thought people were decent in the end. The people who did unsavoury things had some sort of reason – bad childhood, desperate financial circumstances, something to allow for at least a little sympathy. The end of the world has destroyed his naiveté. There are people who have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. People who deserve to be hated.

He hates Van Ark.

Five grimaces as Maxine draws off several tubes of blood.

"How are you, Five?" Sam sits next to her on the cot, the sight of her blood making him rather faint.

Five is silent, her shoulders curling toward her knees, her gaze somewhere far away.

Almost on instinct, he pats her hand. She jerks away, wrapping her arms across her chest.

“Sam, maybe now’s not the best time,” offers Maxine, wringing out a clean cloth in a basin of water. She presses it to Five’s knee, and Five swings upright, hissing through clenched teeth.

“But I always sit with my injured runners in hospital,” pleads Sam.

Five lifts a hand to wave at him, and as he processes the deep, bloodied welts on her wrist, he realizes it’s a good-bye wave. A go-away wave.

“I’ll just give you some time with the doc, then,” he says standing up, fighting to keep his voice from breaking. “You, you let me know if you need anything, all right?”

She pivots slightly toward him, and her hand comes to rest over his, just for a moment.

She’s got it all backwards; she shouldn’t be the one comforting him. He sat safe inside his shack while she was out risking her life. Being tortured. Watching Sara die. She's a hero, while he’s coming apart just at the sight of her. She’ll bounce back from all of this, and she won’t need his help to do it. She doesn’t need him. And he could never deserve her.

He doesn’t notice the crumbs of her blood sticking to his hand until much later.


	5. Chapter 5

Five plows into the comms shack and drops a small plastic bag in front of him, and the scars encircling her wrist swing into his view for a moment.

He’s quickly distracted, though.

“Harry Hippos?” Sam picks up the pouch with the pink hippo’s wide grin. “No way!” He tears it open and lifts out a small yellow piece of candy. “You’re the best, Five. Want one?”

She uncrosses her arms long enough to accept a piece, examining its smiling hippo face and protruding belly from multiple angles before placing it on her tongue. She closes her mouth and chews slowly. 

“Good, yeah?” he says. 

She swallows, shrugs, accepts another.

“So, just the one bag?” he asks. It’s not like Five to skimp on bringing supplies back, including his sweets.

“Send me to corral teenagers again and that’ll be it forever,” she says while reaching into the bag and taking out a handful more. She’s not usually so grabby.

“But they’re so cute!” he says.

Five raises both eyebrows.

“The hippos, not the teens. Seriously,” he says, holding up a tiny hippo, wiggling it back and forth in a dance-like motion to prove his point. “Adorable and delicious. What more could you want?”

She snatches it out of his hand and pops it in her mouth before stalking out of the shack, which is somehow an incredible turn-on. He replays the motion of her fingers a few times in his head. 

He shuts off the equipment – Five’s was the last run of the day – and starts walking back toward his room. He needs to clear his head before dinner.

He pulls open the door to the runners’ barracks and heads into his room, the first one inside the entrance. When they rebuilt the quarters at Abel, he suggested putting the runners close to the comms shack, and Janine not only agreed but insisted that Sam’s be there, too. The runners’ rooms continue down the hall, numbered according to their designation, so Five’s isn’t far from his, not that he’s ever been in there. 

Rooms 3 and 8 remain empty.

He opens his door, kicking aside piles of laundry and papers. He tugs off his shoes and sits down on his bed, only to land on a pile of bumpy, crinkly plastic. He jumps up, perplexed.

Bags of Harry Hippo sweets cover his bed, his desk, and his small shelving unit. The ecstatic pink hippos have him surrounded. He laughs out loud, pushes some of the bags on his bed aside enough to sit down, and rips the top off the nearest one.

No wonder Five felt like she was entitled to a few of his earlier, he reflects as the sugar oozes into his bloodstream. She couldn’t possibly have fit all of these into her rucksack, and he figures that she must have enlisted the teenagers’ assistance. Of course they helped; he wouldn’t want to be on the opposite end of a demanding, exasperated Five, either. 

She orchestrated all of this for him, though, and that thought warms his heart more than a thousand bags of Harry Hippos ever could.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, Google, for showing this Yank what Harry Hippo candies (and their packaging) look like. :)


	6. Chapter 6

Winter at Abel has gotten easier, but it’s still a tough time to disappear if you want to. All of the nice outside hidey places lose their appeal with the heating systems Janine’s rigged up across the township.

So when Sam comes to tell Jody that he hasn’t seen Five all day, that he’s concerned about her, they look first in the pleasant indoor places. Mess hall. Runners lounge. Kitten pen. Gaming area. Library. Greenhouse.

“It’s her day off, maybe we should just let her be,” says Jody after they check the hospital. “I’d probably want to keep to myself, too, if I…”

If I had killed dozens of people, injured scores more, all while being mind-controlled, finishes Sam in his head. Some at Abel haven’t exactly welcomed her back with open arms, though Janine has made it clear that she will not tolerate dissension on that matter.

“I just don’t feel right leaving her alone,” he says.

“Of course you don’t.”

“Don’t you start with me, too. I worry about all of my runners.” He makes sure to emphasize the “all.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“She must feel terrible, after what she’s been through. Anybody would. She’s got to stop blaming herself.”

“All right, then,” she says with a resigned sigh. “Let’s start looking outside.”

They button up their coats, pull on mittens and scarves, and head out into the quad, the garden, even the goat pen.

“She doesn’t want to be found,” says Jody after an hour of fruitless searching. “And I’m freezing my arse off out here.”

“But what if she…”

“Sam, she won’t do anything to hurt herself. Trust me. She just needs time.”

“You go on in," he says. "I’m just going to look a bit longer.”

She shakes her head and trudges back toward the runners’ barracks.

Sam walks in the opposite direction, toward the track and training facility. He wants to believe Jody, that Five is okay, but she’s not been herself since she got back.

He admits to himself that she probably does want to be alone, and it’s him that wants to see her, reassure himself that she’s all right. So he’ll just find her, make sure she’s okay, and leave her to it.

Right.

A flash of color catches his eye behind the notice board by the track. Someone is sitting underneath it, shielded by the bushes on either side. He picks up his pace, and as he gets closer, he recognizes the dull orange of Five’s winter jacket.

She is sitting with her head on her knees, her arms wrapped around her legs, as he approaches.

“Runner Five?”

She doesn’t acknowledge him as he sits next to her. The ground is cold and hard, and tiny snowflakes are starting to fall. He tugs his scarf up a bit higher around his neck.

“Nice day for a breath of fresh air, eh?”

Her arms tighten around her legs.

“All right, then, we’ve been looking for you all day. What’s going on? What are you doing out here in this weather, all by yourself?” He’s having trouble keeping his voice light.

“How can you stand me?” she whispers. She swivels to look at him, her eyes red-rimmed but dry. 

“What?” he says, taken aback.

“I nearly killed you.”

“Oh, that. Well, you didn’t, right? Some part of you fought back, fought against the mind control.”

“Then why didn’t I fight back more…”

“…the other times?”

She nods.

“I bet you were, more than you give yourself credit for.”

She sighs.

“Maxine says that fighting the mind control was like pushing against a stone wall,” he says. “You could push and push, and it’ll never budge, but the instant you stopped pushing, you felt amazing, all happy and calm.”

Five shrugs. He knows she and Maxine have talked about their collective experience of being mind-controlled.

“But you resisted the amazing happy feeling,” he continues. “You didn’t give up. You got away from Moonchild.”

“I will kill her,” she says, her jaw tight. The planes and angles of her face sharpen as her eyes narrow. The tension in her body radiates lethality.

“I believe you,” he says, shivering from more than just the cold. “But how about we go inside, in the meantime?” He stands up, offers her his mittened hand.

“You don’t hate me?” She extends her hand toward his but stops halfway.

“I could never hate you, Five. I knew you were in there, fighting to get back to us.” His chest tightens. How could she ever imagine that his feelings for her were anything less than fondness, affection, maybe even love?

Love. The word, its depth of meaning, parachutes into his core with a surety that shouldn’t surprise him. Of course he loves this heroic, selfless runner. He leans forward enough to grasp her hand and pull her to a standing position. She releases herself from his grip, but not before he notices that her nails look a little blue.

“I can’t have my best runner freezing to death. Who will pick up Curly Wurlies for me?” He removes his scarf, winds it around her neck a few times, fights against the impulse to pull her closer to him. He slips off his mittens and offers them to her.

She examines them for a long minute before putting them on. She surprises him, then, by moving closer and sliding her newly-mittened hands around his back.

“Thank you,” she says, standing on tiptoe to put her chin on his shoulder.

She’s never hugged him before. Her hold is firm but gentle, the press of her body squishing a little of the air out of his down coat. So much of the time he spends with her is just hearing her voice, watching her two-dimensional image on the monitors. When she’s in Abel, it’s almost as if she projects a bubble around her, keeping everyone at arm’s length, so it’s hard to believe that she’s actually solid and three-dimensional in his arms. He hopes his coat is muffling the mad thudding of his heart. He can’t let her go, not now, not ever. Should he tell her everything? Maybe not while she’s so upset? But will he get a chance this perfect again?

She steps away before he can make up his mind.

“Ah, anytime, truly, my pleasure,” he stammers before his brain can tell his mouth to be quiet.

She tucks her arm through the crook of his elbow, and they begin to walk.

He knows once they get inside that the moment will end, that she’ll slip away and he won’t follow. So he focuses on every last detail: her arm, resting against his. Her trainers, striking the ground in staccato steps. Her breath, misting in little puffs.

When she returns the scarf, it carries her scent, winter air and grass and a touch of lavender. That night is the first of many that he falls asleep holding it to his chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't leave Sam unfulfilled in the long run...so stay tuned. :)


End file.
